Insight

I'm excited to announce that I recently accepted an invitation to be an Insight Data Science Fellow in New York City. I want to tell you a bit about the application and interview process in case you find yourself in a similar situation. But first, here's a bit about the program.

The Insight Fellowship

The Insight program is intended for people with PhD's in any field, and who intend to become data scientists in New York City or the SF Bay Area. Over the course of seven weeks, fellows put together  an individual project that showcases their data science abilities, and the Insight crew helps prepare them for interviews. Starting in week eight, interviews begin. As of right now, with 300 alumni, the insight program has a 100% placement rate.

It's free of charge, since they work on something like a recruiter model. They have corporate partners that come to them for recruits, and Insight gets paid if and when a fellow accepts a job offer. I don't know the details, but if it's similar to other recruiters, the amount of the payment is a percentage of the base salary accepted, so they have an incentive to help the fellows negotiate well.

The program is selective, and involves an application and an interview. I heard from one of the Insight directors (from the SF Bay area), Kathy Copic, that the acceptance rate is something like 7%. They're looking for people who have an excellent chance of getting placed at a company, since that's the only way they get paid. Here's how the process works.

The application

First you complete a web form with basic biographical information and a few short answer blocks. They want to know what programming languages you know, and how familiar you are with each. They ask about what kinds of data you have worked with, and what types of analyses you've done, including side projects. Finally, there's a space to explain why you want to be a data scientist. Each of these is limited to around one paragraph.

The interview

If you make the first cut, a Skype interview is scheduled, and lasts about a half hour. They request that you prepare a short "demo" showing they types of data analysis you typically do. My work is mostly done in MATLAB, but I wanted to show that I was familiar with Python, so I did a short project the weekend before the interview, which resulted in the previous blog posts on Twitter data mining.

The interview is extremely relaxed. They say specifically that you're not required to dress up for it, and it's really just a conversation with one of the directors. I spoke with Genevieve, who told me about her career trajectory (she was accepted into the Insight program after her PhD, and was then invited to stay as a director). I talked a bit about my background in nano optics and computational/experimental optics, and about the experimental data I tend to collect.

For the demo, I shared my desktop and showed Genevieve some example MATLAB code that performed some basic noise analysis. I had written it a couple of weeks before to characterize an experimental system. Then I showed the Python code and the results of the Twitter experiment. We talked a little bit about what companies I would be interested in working with, and why I wanted to be a data scientist. At the end she answered a couple of my questions before we wrapped up.

Interviews spanned 11 days. I heard back about my acceptance on the 12th day. I don't know what the acceptance rate was this year, or even how many colleagues will join me as Insight Fellows. I also don't know what percentage of applicants made the first cut but not the second. But hopefully this post will help an applicant for a future session.

The interim

I just moved to NYC with my family, and will begin the program in about a month. In the mean time I'm going to continue familiarizing myself with the basic tools of the data scientist, and getting used to the area. I can tell you so far that the bagels are excellent, and even the "bad" Chinese food is pretty good compared to that in Central Illinois.